Perkins’s remarks show tech’s 1% class has little of it

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story called “The Rich Boy,” in which he wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me…Even when they enter deep into our world, or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”

Nowadays, these words seem especially fitting to describe the once-respected venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who is being lambasted for his bizarre comments over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. For those who missed the brouhaha, in a letter to the editor, Perkins likened the ongoing backlash in San Francisco against tech companies and the richest 1% in America to Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews in the 1930s.

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“This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking,” Perkins wrote. “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

Even the venerable Silicon Valley venture capital firm he co-founded, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers disassociated itself from Perkins and his comments. So did several well-known venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, who called Perkins a name not fit for publication over Twitter. At least one tech industry CEO, Salesforce Inc.
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Chief Executive Marc Benioff, also tweeted his disdain.

“Tom Perkins has not been involved in KPCB in years,” Kleiner Perkins tweeted on Saturday. “We were shocked by his views expressed today in the WSJ and do not agree.”

Perkins later told Bloomberg in an email that he was “shocked” by the violent actions of the Occupy movement, that began with the Occupy Wall Street group, but degenerated into destruction of property in the Bay Area. He said “the press focuses its wrath on the 1%.”

In an interview with Bloomberg West on Monday, Perkins said that he has apologized directly to the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H. Foxman, for his use of the Kristallnacht, which is the name given to a series of coordinated attacks on Jews in Germany and Austria over two nights in 1938.

“It was a terrible word to have chosen,” Perkins said, adding that his co-founder in Kleiner Perkins, Eugene Kleiner, fled Vienna in 1938 eventually coming to the U.S. Added Perkins: “I believe he would have understood my Wall Street Journal letter and he would have agreed with my warning.”

Perkins said that while he “regretted the use of the word, I don’t regret the message.” He added: “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, it is wrong and dangerous, no good ever comes from it.”

Perkins himself admitted in the Bloomberg interview that he was a target of vitriol. “The fact that everyone now hates me is part of the game,” he said. “I am sorry about that, but it was not what I meant to do.”

So far one high-profile supporter of Perkins who has emerged is Tim Draper, co-founder of venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who told Business Insider that Perkins “is a brilliant man, and he is identifying ‘schadenfreude,’ something that continues to be a thorn in humanity’s side. The bitter taste of envy brings us all down.”

Some investors might remember Perkins for his role in shaking up the Hewlett-Packard Co.
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board of directors, when he abruptly resigned from the board in 2006, and ultimately exposed the company’s pretexting scandal, as well as some serious boardroom dysfunction.

I have been an admirer of Perkins for his track record in Silicon Valley and more recently for exposing the spying at H-P. That saga involved H-P hiring private investigators who obtained phone records and followed board members and journalists in an effort to ferret out the source of media leaks. At the same time, though, Perkins disparaged former H-P chairman Patricia Dunn as a stickler for too much corporate governance, which he said was slowing the tech giant down.

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